We recently explained how to create an online store to help online sellers like you get started. However, that leaves one big question: how do you set up your own ecommerce customer service system? That’s all taken care of when you’re selling on eBay or Amazon. How do you handle it on your own?

Here are seven steps toward providing the best customer service possible. We’ll start with the basics for small companies, then move on to more advanced options and long-term strategies.

1. Set Up Your Own Ecommerce Customer Service Email Address

You NEED a support email address. It’s the foundation of any good ecommerce customer support system.

We recommend this as the first stop for your online business for several reasons:

Setting up a branded customer service email address is easy and inexpensive. It may already be included as a feature of the hosting or software you used to set up your store.

It’s the easiest way to handle your customers. You don’t need dedicated support hours, and you can take as long as you want creating a good response to every question.

Nobody ever has to wait on hold.

Your customers do business with you online and they expect to be able to contact you online.

How Do You Do It?

The easiest option is to post your private email address on your website. However, that’s certainly not the best option, as an address like jim@gmail just doesn’t look very professional. You’ll also get plenty of new spam.

There are lots of different ways to create an @yourwebsite.com email address. This makes your business look more serious and lets you keep your private email private.

A great option for Gmail fans is to start a Google Apps for Work account. The basic version costs $5 per month. It includes domain-specific email addresses, as well as several other helpful tools for the fledgling ecommerce business.

You may also want to consider using a contact form to cut down on spam. The Web is full of ways to create contact forms for free, but many require a subscription once you get more than a few messages per month.

There are plenty of other options out there. Check any service you already use with your website—they might offer you email forwarding, domain email addresses, and/or contact forms for no additional cost.

2. Create an FAQ

An FAQ is a great thing to have on your site. Here’s why:

It’s easy to set up.

You can do it for free once your website is up and running.

It saves your customers time by letting them find answers without having to wait for a response from you.

It saves your business time and money by reducing the volume of support requests you get.

How Do You Do It?

The simplest option is to create a page on your site where you answer your most common questions. If you have a lot of questions to answer and need something more advanced, you can use something like the knowledge base provided with a Zendesk Help Center (recommended) or a UserVoice account.

Here’s why you should use social media as an ecommerce customer support channel:

It’s generally free.

You can use the social media pages that you’ve already set up to promote your business—no extra work required.

Nielsen reports that one-third of social media users would rather get support over social media than the phone.

How Do You Do It?

Easy—create business accounts on the different social media channels, then when customers contact you, answer them. This is generally straightforward. However, you may have to jump through a few hoops on some platforms.

For example, anyone can send a private message to a business Twitter account, but you can only send direct messages to standard users if they follow you. That means you can’t start up a private conversation with somebody if they contact you via a Tweet and they aren’t following you yet. Learn more about private messages on Twitter here.

Take the time to learn each platform and soon you’ll make a lot of your customers happier.

It’s worth noting that several types of customer service software, such as Zendesk and Desk.com, can convert social media messages and emails into tickets. This allows you to answer all of your support messages from one place.

4. Offer Live Chat

There is one huge reason to use live chat as an ecommerce customer support channel:

How Do You Do It?

Several SaaS companies provide live chat software. One of the most popular options is Pure Chat, which you can start using for free (though you’ll need to pay if you have more than a few chat sessions each month). And if you choose to use Zendesk, Desk.com, or a similar product, you’ll have the option to add live chat to your current plan.

5. Support Your Customers over the Phone

Phone support may have low customer satisfaction ratings in general, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use it—or that you can’t do a good job with it! Here’s why you should offer phone support:

Hearing a human voice is important to many customers.

You can often get a better idea of your customers’ opinions about your services and products by talking to them directly.

Due to the fact that the phone is one of the oldest and most popular customer service channels, people are just used to it. My experience has shown me that some customers, particularly older ones, will expect or even demand phone support.

How Do You Do It?

You could use your personal phone number. However, do that and I guarantee you’ll get floods of scam calls and a bewildering number of rings from people who have the wrong number. (I speak, tragically, from experience.)

You should handle phone support professionally from the very beginning. Set specific support hours that your business can reasonably handle. Get a dedicated support number that you can use online fearlessly.

6. Create an Online Community

Here’s why it’s a good idea to set up an online community, such as a forum, on your site:

It allows customers to answer each other’s questions, cutting down on the amount of support you need to provide.

It’s low-maintenance—you just need moderators to catch spammers and the occasional rude post.

If you’re willing to invest more time and money into your forum by answering the questions your customers post there, it can serve as an extension of your FAQ, leaving permanent answers online where everyone can see them.

However, it’s best to create a community specifically designed to work as a customer self-help center. I’m probably sounding a little like a broken record here, but such self-help options come included with Zendesk, Desk.com, and some of their competitors.

7. Integrate Your Ecommerce Customer Service

There’s only one downside to offering customer service through so many different channels: it becomes difficult to manage. If you used a different provider for each one of these channels, you could be answering emails with Gmail, replying to messages on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ in separate windows, managing chat through its own client, dealing with phone calls through the company that provides your phone support system, and managing your forums through their own software.

And that’s before going into the fact that you’d be paying five or six different monthly payments, and contacting a different company for support every time something went wrong!

You might have noticed that Zendesk and Desk.com integrate just about every imaginable channel. Both allow you to handle everything from one place, meaning you don’t have to switch between windows all the time. You only have to contact one company for support, and you only have to pay one company each month.

This is called multichannel integration. And once you achieve it, you can provide support that blows away your competitors without bogging down your business.

As such, we highly recommend using Zendesk, Desk.com, or a comparable competitor from the very beginning. They offer free trials and low-priced starter options. Trust us: it’s way better to start with all of your ecommerce customer service channels in one place than to open a gazillion accounts and try to integrate them later!

Psst . . . do you sell on eBay or Amazon? Pretty much the only thing that Zendesk and Desk.com don’t do well is integrating with those marketplaces. That’s where ChannelReply comes in.

"ChannelReply has allowed us to increase the productivity of
our customer service department by consolidating the messaging
from multiple marketplaces directly into Zendesk. As with most
retail businesses, we sell on multiple online channels.
Streamlining customer interactions from these marketplaces
has been crucial to both our customers' experience and our growth.
ChannelReply has done a wonderful job in developing and supporting
this functionality."

JC Webster

COO, Chicago Music Exchange

"ChannelReply has allowed us to integrate multiple eBay and Amazon accounts
into Zendesk creating accountability and making it easy to scale our marketplace
customer service. Without ChannelReply it would be unmanageable to provide the
level of satisfaction our customers expect out of Golfio.
The integration with the eBay and Amazon messaging API is tight and we
couldn't be happier!"

Howard Choi

Business Dev Manager Golfio

"Given the various standards of service that apply, managing multiple marketplace
channels is a challenge to any organization. ChannelReply has given us the ability
to organize our inquries to maximize turnaround and increase our efficiency when
handling our marketplace requests. We look forward to additional features ChannelReply is offering that will only increase our ability to service our customers
across channels."